Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels

The first time I learned about Chantal Akerman was several years ago when I was living in
Bloomington, Indiana. She was scheduled to visit IU Cinema (my favorite place in Bloomington)
where her new film Almayer’s Folly (2011) along with her previous films, Jeanne Dielman, 23
Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) and News From Home (1976), were planned to be
screened. Without any hesitation, I got tickets for all the films. Unfortunately, Akerman could not
make the visit. To be honest, I did not feel sad for her absence until I watched Jeanne Dielman,
23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, which is one of the most striking films that challenges the
traditional representation of women.

Many films, particularly mainstream films, represent women through close-ups, tracking shots,
and the like. Female characters are consistently captured by the camera, and female bodies are
manipulated into a series of fragmented images. Women in those films are reduced to objects of
images and even fetishized. Those films frequently adopt point-of-view shots in order to deliver
the (usually) oversimplified thoughts of female characters. None of these techniques appears in
Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. The film adopts a static
camera and long takes toward the female protagonist Jeanne Dielman, and allows her to get in
and out the screen space freely. In this way, Akerman reminds the audience of the existence of
some kind of "off-screen space" that is hidden from the camera. This unusual technique creates a
unique distance or gap between the audience and the main character. Besides this static camera,
there are neither voice-over nor point-of-view shots. The only manner the audience can utilize to
know about Jeanne Dielman is to "see" her getting on and off screen; everything else about her
—what she thinks, what she loves, what she sees, what she desires, etc.—is beyond the bounds
of the visual images.

The title of the film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, is also an interesting
thing to think about. It provides both the protagonist’s name and her precise geographical
location. By this piece of straightforward information about a person’s “location” in a society,
this title ironically imposes a paradoxical geo-sociological identity for Jeanne Dielman: it locates
her at a specific place but dislocates her from the dynamic society. This echoes Akerman’s main
point on the representation of the female character: seen and unseen, stable and unstable, located
and dislocated. In the end of the day, she is not some object over there for the audience to know
about; she is a subject for the audience to know.

This is a long (201 minutes) and rich film. It deserves the attention of any serious film lover.